I Became Stalin?! - Chapter 203:

Chapter 203

“Damn it, this sucks.”

The Indonesian intervention was not only a burden for the Netherlands.

Rather, it had caused a backlash in other places.

“Long live Indian independence! Get out of India!”

“Get out! Get out!”

Mahatma Gandhi had collapsed and lost consciousness during his hunger strike.

He was transferred to a hospital in an unknown location. When this news spread among the Indians, various protests and rebellions erupted like wildfire across the country.

“Is this it? Is this the place?”

“Yeah, they said so. Let’s go!”

“Aaaaaah!! Give us Gandhi, you bastards!!!”

The hospital door was torn off with a loud noise.

Hundreds of angry protesters armed with sickles, iron bars, and torches stormed into the hospital. Outside, ten times as many people were holding torches and making a commotion.

The medical staff were terrified and did not know what to do.

“Where is he? Where is Gandhi, you dogs!”

“He… he was never here!”

“Don’t lie! We heard everything!”

The man who looked like the leader of the protesters, wearing shabby clothes, grabbed the doctor’s collar and shouted.

They could not produce Gandhi, who was not there. The hospital director was at his wit’s end.

“I… I respect Gandhi too! If he was here, I would have gladly let him go! But he never came this way! Maybe… maybe he went to the Royal Victoria Hospital… Anyway, it’s all the fault of those British bastards!”

“Is that so? Well, let’s go! There!”

The mob of protesters attacked the famous and large hospitals in India.

Of course, most of them were built by the British for the British in India, so the patients had to shiver as they saw hundreds of ‘thugs’ ransacking the hospital, looking for Gandhi.

And the hospitals did not sit still.

[What the hell did you spread that made those mobs flock to the hospital! Damn it, I did everything for you, the police chief!]

“Oh, I don’t know what to say. I’m really sorry, director. We’ll go right away…”

[Forget it, I’m going to contact my mother’s cousin’s uncle’s high school classmate in the homeland. He’s a very high-ranking officer in the army…]

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

The local police chief had to beg and hold the phone as if his life depended on it.

Most of the people who came to India and ran hospitals were the children of the ‘upper middle class’ who had one or two connections with the British ruling class. So they could nag the chiefs.

But the chiefs were no different.

“Hey! What did you do to leave the thugs like that! Do you know how humiliated I was?”

“I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”

They said the same thing as they twisted the joints of their subordinates.

“I’m really sorry. But we don’t have enough troops, sir…”

“Ha… Damn it! What are you doing with your guns? The thugs are running wild and causing trouble, attacking people. Why do you think we gave you guns?”

“…”

The field workers had to make their own decisions in the midst of all the scolding.

What if they fired? Then the situation would get out of control.

Gandhi, Gandhi’s ‘non-violence resistance’ was the reason why the protesters still did not raise their guns and swords against the British. But what if Gandhi was unconscious and they saw the blood of the Indians?

‘Then it’s over…’

The security police were not heavily armed enough to deal with tens of thousands of protesters. At best, they had pistols or old rifles stored in the armory. They had more heads than bullets.

“Fuck, what the hell are they sending us to the jungle for…”

The army that might have to suppress them by force was deployed in the jungles of Indonesia. And there were rumors that they were being beaten by the rebels armed with Soviet and German weapons.

“My life is so miserable…”

The inspector sighed deeply as he checked the armory and saw the dust on the guns that were poorly maintained and piled up shabbily.

He had come to India after hearing that he could get promoted quickly since there were few people who wanted to go there, but the reality was a mess.

He was a civil servant who desperately wanted a stable job, but the various troubles that occurred in India tormented him as much as the homeland that was plundered by the war.

“Inspector! Inspector!”

“What, what is it!”

Fortunately, the salary of the British civil servant was decent compared to the Indian prices, so he was satisfied with his life here. He smiled contentedly as he recalled the voluptuous breasts of his Indian maid whom he had changed recently. But he was startled by the voice of his subordinate that soon reached his ears.

“What’s wrong with you!”

“I, I, well… There’s big trouble!”

He looked closely and saw that his subordinate had a bruise on his eye and was bleeding from his nose. His uniform was covered with dirt, blood, and all kinds of filth. He looked like he had been beaten up somewhere.

“The Indians have started a riot!”

***

The protesters were silent. Like the calm before the storm.

A thing passed over the heads of the densely packed people. They pushed the thing up a little bit with a devout posture, or sometimes burst into tears.

There was a person, no, a corpse on the thing.

“A flag…”

“Raise the flag!”

A blood-red flag rose among the people and wrapped the thing. The protesters began to sing in a low voice, calmly, but with anger.

“The red flag of the people wraps the body of the martyr.”

“As the body cools and hardens, the flag is stained with blood!”

The red cloth that the Indian women had woven stitch by stitch covered the thing that carried the young man who had died from the police’s gunshot.

“Raise the red flag high! We will die under it!”

“Cowards, tremble! Traitors, mock! The enemy flag flies until the end!”

“Long live Indian independence! Long live! Long live!”

The people seemed to be holding back their urge to rush at the police and kill them. The police knew that too, so they did not dare to fire again.

“Damn it, who shot that!”

“Oh, it seems like an accidental discharge…”

“We’re screwed!”

It was not a situation where they could apologize and end it by saying it was an accident, that it was not intentional.

The anger had already crossed the threshold and was boiling over. The police had to pray to God with their guns pointed.

“First… Hey! Arjun! Raju!”

“Yes? Yes! Inspector?”

“Give me your weapons. And John! Take these two and lock them up in the detention center.”

“Yes???”

Meanwhile, the British police were taking their own measures.

A handful of British people could not rule over hundreds of millions of Indians.

So they had incorporated some locals who were familiar with the local situation and could speak English into the bureaucracy and used them as low-level workers.

The two Indian policemen who had their guns taken away and were dragged to the detention center for no reason were also one of those cases.

“We did nothing wrong!”

“That’s right! We are innocent!”

“What? Go!”

The colleagues who had been shoulder to shoulder with them and pointed their guns at the protesters changed their direction of the barrels and shivered. The two Indian policemen were confused and backed away a few steps.

‘Indians cannot be trusted.’

There were pro-French in the police. There were sympathizers with the protesters. The superiors had come to this conclusion a long time ago.

Someone was leaking information to the protesters and sabotaging the police. Even the homeland intelligence agency had made this judgment.

In this critical situation, the inspector thought it would be more dangerous to be with the untrustworthy ones and ordered them to confiscate their weapons.

“Then we will die too!”

“That’s right! Everyone knows that we are policemen…”

But the Indian policemen felt wronged.

Not a few Indians were loyal to Britain in their hearts. Under British rule, even the low-caste people could rise socially, and the Brahmins and nobles who had been troublesome had to bow to the authority of Britain behind them.

But what if the British abandoned them now? They would turn their resentment into more intense hatred because of what had happened. Just by losing their ties with Britain, some of the radical upper castes might try to retaliate.

“Go, I said! Drop your weapons!”

“Without this, we are really dead! Inspector! Aren’t we the same police?”

“The same…?”

The British inspector frowned and burst into laughter when they appealed.

“The same? Did I say that you and we are ‘the same’ police?”

“…”

“How can you and we be the same! You bastards, you’ve been thinking that way and messing around among yourselves and made us this way! You barbaric natives, you have no eyes when you have power behind you… Give it up!”

“…Yes!”

As the situation worsened, they obeyed the order and closed in on their former colleagues. The Indian policemen clenched their teeth.

“Are you… really going to do this?”

“Should I do it fake? For now, you are dismissed for disobeying orders! Dismissed! Drop your…”

Bang!

A gunshot rang out.

The inspector could not finish his sentence and looked at his chest that was turning red with shock.

The Indian, Arjun, who held the gun with smoke rising from the barrel, seemed to be shocked by what he had done.

He could not say anything either, and dozens of bullets hit him and his colleague who was about to say something.

“An Indian killed a British policeman!”

Bang! Rat-a-tat! Bang! Bang bang! The police were shocked by the unexpected situation and fired wildly without sparing their scarce bullets.

“Why…”

The other one, Raju, who had intended to drop his weapon, muttered as he was covered in blood, but he stopped thinking when a bullet shattered his skull.

“Gunshots! Gunshots!”

“Where? Who?!”

“Over there, over there!”

The incident did not end there. The crowd that had been excited for a while was startled by the gunshots and ignited their anger again.

They had already lost a young man because of the police’s alleged accidental discharge. And while they were marching with his body, the police shot again.

The British police, who had not thought of provoking the protesters and were out of their minds by the unexpected situation, were terrified.

“…We’re really fucked.”